


the things we lost in the fire fire fire

by cyanica



Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abuse, Abusive John Winchester, Age Play, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Altered Mental States, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood, Child Abuse, Cutting, Dean Winchester Whump, Depression, Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Domestic Violence, Gen, Hospitalization, Hospitals, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt No Comfort, Identity Issues, Injury, Internalized Victim Blaming, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Molestation, Multiple Personalities, Overdosing, Pedophilia, Pre-Canon, Protective Dean Winchester, Protective Sam Winchester, Self-Harm, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Content, Suicidal Dean Winchester, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Teenchesters, Victim Blaming, Weechesters, Whump, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:34:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26749576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica
Summary: How was he supposed to explain that sometimes, his head belonged to another, two anothers, perhaps even three, and they're all trapped inside is fraying sanity like glowing fireflies in little glass jars; that sometimes he was a marine soldier who liked to hurt himself – purge himself of sin, of insubordination; sometimes he was a chick who sounded like the warmth of his mother; and sometimes he was a kid that wanted building blocks and french lullabies and to eat crayons.Or Dean has dissociative identity disorder.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester/John Winchester
Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947775
Comments: 1
Kudos: 103
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	the things we lost in the fire fire fire

**Author's Note:**

> the winchester systems contains four alters:  
> i. dean - host, trauma holder  
> ii. soldier - prosecutor, trauma holder (male, twenties)  
> iii. deano - little, trauma holder (male, four years old)  
> iv. baby - maternal-like caretaker, protector (female, thirties - forties)
> 
> please heed the tws in the tags. this fic deals with child abuse, pedophelia, molestation, rape (non graphic/detailed), suicide attempt and self-harm. if you thought john winchester was bad in canon, this fic just makes his character completely and forever irredeemable and an absolute piece of shit that should’ve died sooner. 
> 
> This was written in a day, legit it's all i did for like 12 hours and i am not okay.
> 
> this fic is definitely hurt no comfort and overall just really angsty all throughout, however the ending is somewhat hopeful with a touch of mild hurt/comfort so that's why the two tags are there.
> 
> disclaimer – i am not a medical or psychiatric professional. there will be inaccuracies about DID im sure, but i tried my best to research effectively.
> 
> whumptober alternative prompt 6: altered states
> 
> title from ‘things we lost in the fire’ - bastille

Dean was four and his home had burned. His mother had been inside, and although he hadn’t known it at the time, that night was essentially the end. 

What once had been loving and familiar and warm, had morphed into something unrecognisable; something that reminded him of the time he’d cut his foot open on broken glass, or fever-induced nightmares where the monsters lay, and of the one time his parent’s fought with booze bottles and smashed dinner plates that erupted into fragmented china against the drywall.

Only, the _after_ that existed of stitching wounds together, of hushful french lullabies and of blanket cocoons never came, as if Dean’s incredible young, so very naive universe had desaturated of the amazing array of colours it had before, and he was left in an abyss of oblivion where the adults were always angry and Sammy was always crying. He wasn’t sure where Dad kept the hello-kitty band-aids to make him feel better, to fix things and rebuild them better in his own little way a 4-year-old might.

But he’d tried. He’d carried baby Sammy from ash, from the ruins for their home, from his mother who he couldn’t save, and had never stopped to put him down since.

He’d learned who he needed to be fairly quickly after that. His father had said as much, and Dean never questioned it, because who was he in this world to want?

_I’m leaving for a few weeks, don’t call._

_Your job is to take care of Sammy._

_The gun is for emergencies. You’ll have to make up your brother’s formula._

And he thought that’s where it started, if it had to start somewhere. Funny that it was at the end. It was funny that he had held a gun in his small, little fingers that positioned the weapon at the door because daddy had said that ghosts were real, while his sleeping baby brother lay in his lap. He was heavier than Dean had thought babies would be.

It was there that Dean decided Sammy was who he lived and died for, with all of his four-year-old knowledge about the world where he knew that sometimes people burned on the ceiling, and sometimes dad fought monsters until he became them. 

Dean would make the sun rise entirely just for Sam for eternity, and it was such a pity that Sam would only grow up with the same sacrificial ideology, and would rid the universe of the sun so Dean wouldn’t have to do that anymore.

But tonight in the dusty, pay-by-the-hour motel room that smelled of mould and impurity, Dean was only four-years-old, and knew where his place was. He didn’t think it as anything other than normal when daddy came home half-dead and with more blood staining his body than Dean knew existed inside humans – his own mother had burned, after all. He’d watch cartoons, watch daddy drink until he said funny things that made Dean want to cry, watch as Sam breathed just in case he stopped because that was his job. He was the keeper, and that’s all there was to his little universe where Dean had never been so very young, and yet so much older than he should have been. 

* * *

“You killed her, you know.” Daddy said in the dark of the motel room and he sounded angry. There are glass bottles that pollute the room as much as the unknown filth and grime did, and cigarette ash was heavy within his lungs, coming out of his chest like a dragon. Dean didn’t like the smell, but it had become familiar enough for him to feel homesick without it. He also didn’t like it when daddy couldn’t talk straight or walk by himself or made horrible noises in the bathroom, but that too, was the closest Dean had ever felt to a constant in their chaotic life, never staying in a town for more than a couple months, never anywhere long enough to catch his breath. 

Dean was six years old, and he knew monsters were real – his daddy had said so – so when John tells him this, Dean believes it, as well. Why would he not? 

He didn’t know what to say. He’d been cradling Sam to sleep in his very large bed because none of the rooms they ever stayed in ever had toddler cribs. 

Apparently silence was the wrong answer, though, and daddy’s face contorted into something evil against the glowing red and blue street lights outside. The colourful iridescence made his eyes seem feral, hungry and Dean through distantly, from somewhere beyond that didn’t feel entirely like his own head, that daddy was one of the monsters he was supposed to shoot with salt and blessed water. 

“Mary would be _alive_ , if not for the two of you.” He snarled, looming like a shadow as he stood from his armchair with trembling body convulsion that twisted his skeleton like a crumbling metal contraption and staggered towards the heap of Dean and Sammy on the bed. 

“Daddy!” Dean screamed as his father threw the whiskey bottle at the wallpapered drywall behind their heads, shattering the seams of glass into a thousand unfixable, serrated pieces that flew by his skin as it rained down upon them. The bed of broken glass fragments tore through bits of his flesh as he struggled to get Sam off the sheets. His brother had awoken, jumping to life as if a bomb had exploded in this hellish warzone that was a six-year-olds homely battlefield, and Sam’s screams joined Dean’s as their father yelled too, a chaotic symphony of some deranged, twisted concept facading as a family. 

“You boys took away _everything_ from me!” Daddy yelled, and sometimes when this happened, they would get angry pounding knocks at the door, loud painful bangs through the other side of the drywall that would make daddy stop, but tonight there was nothing. “Ungrateful, murderous pieces of shit –”

Daddy pinned Dean against the back of the headboard, glass fragments cutting into his delicate flesh in jagged, hazardous seems as if his body was pure paper. Blood was trickling onto the sheets, tainting them wet arrays of streaked vermilion, in a nauseating mixture of violence against clean white, and Dean didn’t think as he pushed Sam off his lap, onto the floor, so that his brother wouldn’t be cut, wouldn’t have to be poisoned by Dean’s streaming blood from where he lay in a bed of broken glass.

The reaction from daddy was instantaneous. “You _dare_ hurt your brother, boy?!” He screamed, and Dean, for the first time in a long time, he wanted to scream back. He wanted to cry and yell and weep that, _no_ , he was trying to _save_ Sammy. But daddy didn’t see it that way. Maybe Sam didn’t either because his baby brother was sobbing like nothing he’d ever heard upon the motel floor. His cries rang in Dean’s ears like an infinite siren playing throughout eternity, of gunshots that amplified against the walls of his feeble little mind like cascading firefight, and although Sammy wasn’t red or wet or tainted in the way Dean could see, he looked like agony. He looked like the colour of cigarette ash from daddy’s bloodless lips and sounded the way his mom had in the fire. 

“I’m sorry!” Dean squealed, voice a mere shrill that barely made itself audible above Sammy’s sobs, and suddenly Dean forgot about the blood, about his own flesh with many broken mutilations, and that daddy’s too-big hand had collided into the side of his face hard enough for his head to hurt like nothing else ever had. He saw stars fizzle themselves out behind his eyes, nebulae of constellations burn all throughout the ungodly universe behind his eyes, and felt his face burn with smothering iron that flayed his flesh down to the bone. 

Sammy’s screams were searing daggers into his head like the shards of glass had lacerated his skin, and above anything else in the world, he wanted his brother to _shut the fuck up_ so badly that he felt like sobbing himself. 

He wouldn't ever say that though. Sammy was good and clean and he didn’t mean to break Dean’s skull apart with his lungs – that was daddy, but he had hurt Sam first, so this was his atonement. 

_You break it, you buy it._

_You have to be a good little soldier and keep your brother safe._

_You have to face consequences._

“I’m sorry, daddy.” Dean tried again, this time keeping his voice still and quiet, because surely, that's what daddy wanted. It has to have been; Dean wasn’t certain he would be able to say anything else without his voice breaking apart the way the bottle had, or prevent himself from sobbing like Sam, because he knows daddy doesn’t like it when boys cry.

“I bet you’re damn fuckin’ sorry, kid.” Daddy said and went to get another bottle because, “fuckin’ hell, Dean, that was 20 bucks I had to waste on the wall.”

* * *

Dean was ten when maybe he thinks something is very, very wrong. 

It was dark outside like it was every other night, and this time they were in some state beginning with an ‘N’ that Dean couldn’t remember the name of. They are in separate rooms in their little motel, and Dean remembered feeling very grateful – had thought it was the greatest thing in the world to have a whole room just for him and Sammy where they could build blanket forts and read storybooks with their flashlights – until he hadn’t.

“Let your brother have that room, Deano.” Dad had said and the smile fell away from Dean’s face the way it sometimes did when he spotted five bottles of liquor in their duffles or when teachers asked where he got those bruises from. “Sammy’s a growing boy, he can sleep in that bed all to himself. You can sleep in my room, champ.” 

And Sam had cheered, paraded his six-year-old, shrinking celebrations around the apartment as if he’d won all the pizza or candy or cartoons in the world and Dean felt sick. 

It was midnight, and dad was three bottles in, and Dean was in his pajamas when his father had told him he loved him for the first time since the fire. “You look so much like your mother,” he had slurred with bleary eyes and blissful oblivion filling his mind as if the escapism through the alcohol had finally worked his time. Dean liked that he sounded happy – liked that he was hearing of mom and that his dad was talking about her; he liked that a part of her was also in him because maybe they shared the same eyes, the same hair, the same warm hands. 

He didn’t like that dad was too touchy, too suffocating against his small little chest and made Dean put his hands where he shouldn’t – where he had learned not to in health class and elementary school counseling – but it made dad smile. He smiled like _before_ : like the time Sammy had come home from the hospital, like summer days in the park, like the way he’d look when both he and mom sang Dean to sleep on french lullabies and The Beatles, nestled safely in their arms and _knew_ that nothing could ever hurt him if he was theirs. 

“Oh, Mary, baby,” dad moaned as he touched Dean’s young, delicate paper-like skin, across where the little scars on his highs had healed over from the glass and other watercolour-stained bruises that bigger fists had made. Dad grazed his too-large hands in between Dean’s legs and it made bile rise in Dean’s throat, enough for him to swallow it back done in heaves and chokes and churns that made his stomach roll, because somehow, _this_ had tainted him. He was bruised and scarred and tainted and wrong and he was ten-years-old, and he didn’t think he would ever be clean again.

Dad told him he loved him, when it was all over. He called him ‘Mary’ and ‘baby’ and then finally ‘Dean’, and Dean threw up in the bathroom after dad had passed out. 

Dean was glad his father loved him.

Dean was also very glad that Sam didn’t look like him at all.

* * *

Dean was thirteen the first time when he did not feel like Dean anymore. 

The games dad played with Dean were not just touching anymore, but they hurt and he cried and dad told him that boys don’t cry, “ _you little shit, so manipulative and spoilt,”_ and that Sam could hear them across the apartment, so Dean always tried to stay very still and very quiet until it was all over, and if he was, his dad told him he loved him. 

If he was good, followed the rules and didn’t wake up Sam, or run away or cry or even _think_ about telling anyone, he would be praised and loved and maybe he could even take Sammy to the park later in the week to watch the stars.

He liked those nights. It was always only ever him and Sam and never dad, and they’d make up their own constellations because the book Sammy had borrowed from the library had very big words in it, and neither of them knew how to say ‘Camelopardalis’. 

So instead they connected the eternal stars on their own, made shapes like ‘dog’ and ‘smile’ and ‘boy’.

“That one looks like you!” Sam had squealed with a huge smile on his face and pointed to what should have been the constellation ‘phoenix’, but tonight, it was Dean.

With Sam, Dean didn’t have to be anyone else. He would always be a protector, an older sibling to his baby brother; but he could also be a kid. A kid that could point at stars and claim the sky for his own and give his nine-year-old brother what he’d never had.

But that was never always.

If he were bad – if the tears came uncontrollably no matter how hard he stopped them, how hard he bit into his own hand or if his instincts uncontrollably, inevitably fought back, Dean was not loved. He would go hungry without food for a week, maybe without water for a couple of days if he’d been really bad. If he fought, he was left to cover the many bruises and cigarette burns that littered his body with outgrown, too-small clothing before he walked to school in the winter the next day, or be forced to beg on his bloodied, carpet-burnt knees, “no, no, no! Don’t get Sam, dad, please! I’ll be good, I swear! Don’t make Sammy –”

So perhaps it was easier, easier if someone else stepped into Dean’s place. Someone who followed orders and did as they were told. Dean couldn’t help but fight it, every time his dad drank himself insane and looked to Dean to fix what was missing since the fire, but this _someone else_ who seemed to check-in when Dean himself drifted away was different.

“You’ll be good for daddy, won’t you Deano?” 

“Yes, daddy.”

They craved – _ached_ – to be loved in the way a child was loved, they cried when daddy wasn’t near them enough, and they felt very small, very young in Dean’s mind like some sort of cry baby that wanted their daddy all that time, because that, in the mind of a someone so innocent, was what love looked like.

* * *

They’re hunting some three-headed freak called a Hydra in New Orleans, and Dean knew he was awake, that his body was moving and talking and masquerading with his own face as if to pretend to be Dean in front of Sammy and dad, but it wasn’t. 

He was somewhere otherworldly, maybe in outer space, maybe somewhere that shouldn’t exist, but he was here where it was safer – where dad couldn’t touch him, where nothing smelled of ash and cheap liquor, where there was no fire or burning or embers to lick as his skin like kinder. It was a perfect oblivion where all was calm and nothing ever hurt.

He should come more often.

Except all was _not_ calm. Outside in the real world where things were ugly and painful and deranged, there was a jagged, sharp piece of broken glass that had skimmed across his hands from the ground, because dad had said that a Hydra would only be killed with the sands of the Earth ( _thanks, Sammy_ – _whatever that means_ ), so they’d figured shards of glass were a good substitution. 

“Kill it! You blind, Dean?!” John screamed over the hissing and screeching of the three-headed snake woman that had thrown them across the room. John had lost his makeshift glass dagger somewhere within the fray, and now the one cutting into his palm was all they had.

“Yes, sir.” He ground his teeth against the stinging of his eyes from the Hydra’s poison ( _great, Sammy, they spit venom, now?_ ) fighting against everything that was still very hazy in his disoriented mind from the blow. 

The name that was not his name was enough for him to find the fury to stab the creature with, over and over again, constantly and infinitely until one of the thing’s snakeheads had decapitated from her body entirely, painting his chest and face in a putrid green sludge that smelled like sewer.

The Soldier didn’t even feel his flesh tear open. The adrenal of having purpose, of being powerful for the first fucking time in his meaningless little life was excruciatingly exhilarating, and it wasn’t until his palm had become too mutilated that crimson blood was spurting like a fountain into his face, did he stop. 

He rose from the gory, smoking ground, the makeshift blade dropped by the Hydra’s unmoving head, and let his blood drain to the dirt. It made him look somewhat omnipotent, he decided. The durability to withstand the hurt, the sheer determination to not succumb to his enemy, the need to fight for John’s satisfaction, his praise, his love had consumed the Soldier. Dean Winchester would never be anything other than weak, but the Soldier would prove that he himself was something worthy.

* * *

He was not alone, and that should have been very, very scary. 

It was. 

He was possessed, he _had_ to be. Multiple ghosts – or maybe just one _insane_ one – was haunting his body. It was a ghost who liked the military and saying “sir, yes, sir” and hated making dad mad, while also being someone who cried like a baby and called his father “daddy” and sucked his thumb when children’s cartoons played. 

Dean wasn’t sure if that was typically ghost behavior, he sure as hell wasn’t going to ask Sam to do research on it, so instead, Dean decided that the best courses of action would be to do an exorcism on himself. He was fourteen now, old enough to go out on hunts with his dad, and therefore had seen the ritual happen a few times. He knew with ghosts you are supposed to salt and burn the bones, but Dean doesn’t want to light himself on fire today. Doesn’t want to have one more thing in common with his mom.

“Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus omnis satanica potestas,” He began reading the stolen library book. It was an exorcism for demons, but hopefully it worked on ghosts, too. He wasn’t sure if that’s how the laws of the supernatural worked – _demon beats ghost, ghost beats poltergeist, poltergeist beats demon_ – but Dad had only taught him these things when he’d been The Soldier, all “sir, yes, sir”, “mission success”, and “medical attention unnecessary. Status: functional”. So maybe he was a little behind on learning the ways of the family business, but he was trying to fix the things that were broken, and that should be enough for his dad to love him like parents were supposed to love their kids. 

As Dean continued with the incantation, he didn’t feel any different. He knew that was smoke supposed to come out from his mouth, or maybe the shadowy phantom of someone else was supposed to break themselves free from his body, but Dean felt nothing.

He was the same: still broken, still insane, still housing other occupants within his mind like it was a damn squatters house, and this hadn’t changed anything.

So maybe if he screamed the words, that would work. Maybe if he shouted them until his lungs had no air and his face was blue and bloodless. Maybe if he tore his vocal cord apart at the seams like everything else that rotted and died and collapsed within his hands that maybe, maybe he would be free.

It didn’t. Nothing he tried ever died. 

He did rethink the salt and bones and fire idea, though.

* * *

Halloween was bullshit, Dean knew – had known since the end that real monsters didn’t wear plastic fangs or coat themselves with corn syrup blood or wore sexy lingerie, and the truth was a lot more depressing. 

But it was October 31st nonetheless and the world still wasn’t any less evil, so fuck it. The lower-middle-class neighbourhood kids were throwing a block party, there was enough free booze to re-sink the titanic, Sammy’s a nerd that did homework on friday nights, and dad’s gone to hunt werewolves in Montana. Makes sense. 

“Who are you supposed to be?” A girl who had the face of a Cheryl or an Addison or a Beth (but definitely not an Elizabeth) asked him with smoke fuming from her too-red painted lips with fishnets that were ripped over her upper thighs. He couldn’t decide if it was for the aesthetic of her hooker-girl costume or that just what fashion was these days. 

“River Phoenix,” Dean answered breathing in the taste of the ash from her cigarette as if it were his oxygen. “What are you?” 

“I’ll show you,” Cheryl-Addison-Beth replies in that fake, supposedly sexy pornstar voice that was much too nasally and irritating (if he were being honest), but thinks _oh,_ as she draws him in by the back of his head to meet ruby lips that taste like cigarette butts and dying embers. Pornstar hooker it was then. 

She takes off his clothes, as their mouths collide like starving, animalistic creatures in the dark or just plain teenagers, and the force of another’s tongue inside his mouth is enough for Dean to feel like his nerves were zipping in chaotic pulses from sparks of lightning. 

Her hands had guided themselves across his bare, exposed flesh that was littered with molten watercolour bruises and cigarette burns, barely batted an eye, or didn’t even notice. Some part of him liked that, he knew. He was seventeen, it was Halloween and he could pretend to be someone else for a night where fake monsters roamed the streets and he had sex with a girl who couldn’t decide if she was a pornstar or a hooker. 

“What’s your name, River?” She breathed, their kisses became harsh and desperate and greedy, because Dean wasn’t supposed to _want_ , but he was taking it anyway. He wasn’t sure how to respond with her fuzzy, cigarette butt tongue down his thought, but he didn’t think it mattered.

“What’s yours?” He asked instead, falling against the mattress and the girl fell with him. Her fingers ran themselves feverishly, hungrily through his hair, pulling him down and closer towards the taste of her mouth and Dean wanted this, he did, he did he did he did he did _he did._ He was a punk-ass loser junior from a different school who showed up at the neighbourhood Halloween party to get drunk and get laid, and that was all he needed to be.

“Touché,” She scoffed into his mouth, dragging her charcoal lips over Dean’s salty skin, and left smearing scarlet cheap lipstick marks against his flesh. He breathed in the scent of her fire embers and alcohol breath, and opened his eyes to focus on her crumbled mascara and thick, lumpy foundation because he refused to think about anything else.

She sucked at the skin of Dean’s neck and shoulder, all teeth and sticky saliva that felt like needles, and grabbed the shaft of his cock with her cold, deadened hands and Dean felt his lungs collapse within his chest. His heart was pounding so hard he could hear the boom boom boom resemble a siren call, and suddenly the suffocation of her ashen mouth breathing hot air into his flesh, his throat, his face was entangling him like ropes of lead binding his feet and hands together until he couldn’t move, completely paralysed.

The suddenness of undeniable _wrongness_ hit him like a comet, stars burning through to the back of his eyes like meteorites impaling the Earth with each scream of someone sobbing stop stop stop inside his brain.

_No_ , he wanted to yell back, to scream himself raw and blue and bloody until the insignificant voice living inside his head would leave him alone, _let him live his fucking life_ , but he could feel himself fading fast.

Dean didn’t feel quite like Dean anymore, and the girl – her lingering taste of fire and smoke on his tongue – felt too undeniably familiar.

“G-get of me! Stop!” He cried, tears burning down his face as his chest heaved with the weight of a stranger suffocating him. He lay thrashing, kicking and screaming as if the threat of paralysis would suddenly devour him, and his little, tiny body that had small bones and breakable skin would crumble like paper. 

The stranger pulled away harshing, ripping herself from his body after he managed a kick to her chest, her teeth catching on his lip with enough force for blood to stream down the front of his chin, his chest, the bedsheets. 

“What the fuck!?” She screamed, angry like his daddy was when he refused to lie in the bed, or let him touch his privates, or suck his daddy’s cock. Deano knew that when we didn’t do those things, he was being a bad, naughty little boy because daddy only wanted to show his love, but this was not his daddy. This was a stranger, and he didn’t want that love. He wouldn’t betray his daddy like that, he wanted to be loved, and if he were to be ruined by someone else, the corruption, impurity, poison would taint him for the end of infinity. 

“I want my daddy!” He sobbed, because now there are other strangers bursting into the room, bearing witness to him in a way that only his daddy should, and he’d never felt so alone and scared. He didn’t know why we was here, or where the fuck _here_ even was, but he was left to pick up the pieces of whatever mess someone else had gotten him into, and just wanted his daddy to come find him. 

He rocked back and forth on the side of the road two blocks down from the house of strangers, with bruises blossoming like blue and purple watercolours down his stomach and back, until the sun had bled over the horizon and Sam came to get him. 

They watched Scooby-Doo, Sammy made him breakfast and he threw it up. Deano asked when daddy would be home, but Sammy was very pale, very shaky and never replied.

* * *

There was godawful screaming between John and Sam that seemed to blossom into punched drywall of their grotty floral motel wallpaper, or the slamming of breaks inside the Impala that had Dean smashing his head against the dashboard.

Ever since Dean had tried to be someone else of his own accord, by his own free will and destiny – for the first time choosing who he could have been, rather than what higher powers or what-ever-the-fuck had made him into at that blurry Halloween party that felt like a cloud – Sam had been developing his own pubescent teenage identity, defying against their father in almost any and every way he could.

There had always been something inside Sam and John – something that could have been fatherly love in another life – but that had dissipated the more Sam started to realised that normalcy wasn’t living out of their car, it wasn’t his older brother always sleeping in the same bed as their dad, it wasn’t devoting his life to the things that shouldn’t exist.

But Sammy was thirteen now. He was old enough to know things he shouldn’t, and old enough to know when he deserved a life that Dean couldn’t save him from.

“You have a responsibility to this family, boy!” John was shouting over the radio, and the pounding rain hit the windows of the car like bullets. His heart was racing beyond what was definitely normal for merely sitting in the front seat of their cat, all while they plummeted down a rural state highway at 6PM. “To this _life –_ “

“I don’t _want_ this life –“ Sam fired back, and though his brother was standing up to their father in ways Dean never could, it didn’t feel liberating. It felt dangerous, as if Sam was dancing with gasoline around the embers of their old house before it had burst into flame and torched everyone one inside, down to their blacked bones and oozing flesh that charred apart from their bodies in rotten pus and bloody chunks. The scream of their voices over the sound of the firefight rain and blaring radio was enough to make _his_ skin feel like it was burning amongst the debris of his daydreams, and though he wanted to scream at Sam to stop and to never ever ever make John angry, he was paralyzed in the front seat of the impala, listening to the battlefield outside his senses, and inhale oxygen that had diminished from the atmosphere.

“– To kill all the evil sons of bitches in this fucking world! The ones that murdered your mother! You should want revenge for everything they _did_ to this family!” 

“And what about what _you_ did?” Sam seared, and Dean prepared himself to inevitably crash and burn and collided with the trees of to the side of the road, for glass to impale itself inside his face from the broken debris of the windshield, to throw his hand back so Sam wouldn’t have to die on impact – but the car stayed on the road. The brakes didn’t slam. The gunfire was rain, and the alarm was music.

“Shut your mouth if you know what’s good for you, boy.” John grit his teeth, bearing yellowish canines and scabbed over lips that always reeked of drugstore whiskey, and peered at Sam’s definite, stubborn, young face through the rearview, and then to Dean who felt like he was drowning underwater, lungs full of water, yet didn’t have the words to call for help. “Learn some respect from your brother who can keep his mouth shut, follow orders like the soldier you ought to be, and gives his father the respect he deserves.”

Sam did still at that, going cold and pale and maybe a little afraid. Dean wondered if there had been a retort on his lips – _yeah, only when he’s brainwashed; only ‘cause he wants you to love him; only ‘cause he’s weak and scared and likes to kiss ass_ – but the words never came. Sam seemed to know better.

It took them two hours of silence to reach Kentucky where some alleged poltergeist haunted an abandoned schoolyard, and the motel was just like the thousands of ones before it with red neon signs, a pay-by-the-hour policy and vending machines that didn’t work. 

This one was ugly and cheap and smelled so familiar Dean could cry. 

Maybe he did when he came back from the car at 11 o’clock, after Sammy was in the room tucked away asleep, and John had gone off wherever he had gone, because despite his slurred, breathy murmurs of _Mary, baby_ and _good, soldier,_ Dean’s presence had disgusted him after that, so he’d fucked off to get more booze.

His under-eyes were black and blue, red around the edges, and though he didn’t necessarily _like_ how he somehow unexplainably, impossibly wasn’t himself on many occasions and floated to where things felt dreamy and intangible, he wished he had escaped outside of his body tonight.

Dad had been very angry from the car ride and from the decade-old fire. 

“Are you okay?” Sam asked from the closest of the two beds from where Dean stood like a shadow in the doorway. His hand reached for his butterfly knife underneath his pillow like Dean had taught him if intruders or monsters for a too-drunk dad came stumbling in.

“Yeah. Go to bed.” Dean sighed because his body hurt and he was so tired he could collapse, and right now, he really didn’t feel like talking about his feelings regarding the things that made him vomit at ungodly hours and wake up with lungs that suffocated on sheets that always smelled of smoke and sex, to his thirteen-year old baby brother. “I’m taking a shower.” He added quietly, wondering if maybe the clingy, smothering, putrid smells that followed him everywhere had just become a part of him – poisoned his soul with the rotting aromas until it had gone black and festering – and that was why he could rarely ever breathe. 

Dean was moving across to their bathroom, maybe trembling with limbs that ached like a cold fever, but Sam was suddenly talking again. “Do you wanna watch The Jetsons?” He asked, and it was casual enough for the words to be tossed around as if this wasn’t the dead of night, but there was also something warmer, something softer to his voice that made Sam seem older than what he was – knew more than he should have. 

“What?” Dean sighed again, tone slightly harsher and almost came out in a biting snap, but that didn’t phase Sam. He turned around from the bathroom doorway, looking over at Sam to where his baby brother sat on the double bed, a VHS in his hands like some sort of offering.

“I stole a tape because you liked it when it was on a while ago.” He said it like it was nothing, like watching old cartoons in the middle of the night with an older brother who may or may not be losing his mind half the time was no big deal. The gesture was so incredibly Sam that Dean momentarily forgot he was unclean – forget that tonight, he was supposed to scrub his flesh raw with motel soap and crusty towels until he bled, until his skin was red and inflamed and falling off.

“I haven’t watched that since I was a kid,” Dean said.

But he was wrong –

“No,” Sam said simply, nonjudgmentally, and with knowing eyes that shifted as Dean stepped closer, rolling the tape over within his hands as if to trigger a memory that wasn’t his. “We watched it a few weeks ago. You were upset, but it calmed you. I thought you might want to watch it with me now.”

“I don’t remember.” He confessed, and felling the familiarity of _otherness_ within his head and knowing that someone very young – someone who likes pie and toy trains and being tucked into bed, sung to sleep – would very much like to watch the show again.

“That’s okay. Do you still wanna watch it?” He asked, expression morphing from the comforting simplicity to one more like Dean’s own on the rare occasions he got to be cocky, a smart ass, believe himself to be whoever’s name was on his forged ID rather than who he was inside. “I was very sneaky when I took the tape, like you taught me. They only had the second season, though. Is that alright?”

Dean nodded, giving the tape back for Sam to set up in the VSR and said, “thanks, Sammy.” 

John came back around twilight dawn as the sun bled through the curtains, off his face and swearing at the clouds, while Sam and Dean had fallen asleep watching a happy cartoon family and their adventures in outer space.

* * *

Not everything was always children’s television and comforting baby brothers, though. Not everyone got to have nice space-themed animated pictures or orange crayons to draw animals or for Sam to come to their rescue. 

Some had to face the lies of fatherly love, exist like discarded waste in this hell of a world, because whenever anyone else in their body got nice things, they had to fuck it up.

Dean Winchester had to fuck it up. He had been loved softly and gently and been called ‘baby’, but something inside Winchester crumbled like paper, and suddenly there he was, fighting and crying and refusing to return John’s love like a good son would.

And so the Soldier had to fix his mistakes, pay for Winchester’s sins and atone for his insubordination with his own bloodied, fraying, and skinless knees, like worshiping John the same way he would a god that existed, and prayed for their salvation with his own body writhing against the sheets at John’s mercy – punishment.

“My good, little soldier.” John panted, a guttural moan breaking free from his lips as cum filled the insides of the Soldier’s hole, devouring his core like it was poison and slowly burning him until it rotted down into his godless bone marrow. It was rough and painful and bloody and raw and _incomparably_ unlike the way John had ever loved Dean. That wasn’t _fair_.

So, tonight he wanted to _hurt_. He wanted Winchester to hurt in the way the Soldier hurt. He wanted twisted, painful revenge against Dean’s ability to show his love to their father, compromising the Soldier’s need to be loved by him.

Lying with John’s arm across his feverish, churning abdomen, the Soldier maneuvered himself so that he stood with purpose, with conviction and duty in the way John had always wanted. His hole was raw and bloody, there hadn’t been any lube because the last of it had been used on Dean, but the Soldier refused to make a sound, even as his ass felt as if it would spilt at the seams like fraying cotton.

He stalked over to the bathroom where a combat knife shone metallic and freely against the moonlight seeping in from the motel’s rusted window, like a twisted but ecstatic form of revenge, of liberation, and held it above his arm, facing the imposter inside the mirror glass.

The Soldier stood like the figure in his nightmares, looming in the shadows amongst the ruins of this Earth like a warrior of suffering, like the one who had orchestrated their father to unlove them, and that ungrateful, undisciplined man was _relishing_ in it. A sickening, twisted smile of bloodied teeth and smoky ash slipped from his mouth as the Soldier bore witness to the debris of sanity within the mirror, watching as Dean Winchester taunted him. 

_He_ was the reason John was the way John was, and why John would never love them enough as he loved Sam – he was the reason why their mother had burned on the ceiling which had brought forth their family’s own twisted version of holy armageddon, all because Dean Winchester was _sin_.

Winchester defied and disobeyed and unloved; he tainted the Soldier’s ability to be loved by John in the way people should be loved – caressed instead of hit, be cleaned of blood and cum that poisoned his body rather than be fucked so hard he tore his flesh open and lay like an abandoned, worthless whore in the mouldy mattress.

So he stood, facing the other _thing_ that was not him in the mirror, and stained the sink red with copper penance in the bathroom. 

This was punishment, and it was relief; and so the Soldier sighed because he knew Winchester was hurting, repenting for his insubordination and wrongdoings through the purging of his blood and opening of never-healing scars. The soldier felt free, closing his eyes hazily like he’d felt the separation between himself and Winchester rip apart through each cut of euphoric liberation with the knife dancing across his veins. Crimson wetness bled into the tiles, painting them human red with the colour of his freedom and penance and redemption and unlove.

The Soldier faded away when he had lied on the cool tiles, freezing him motionless, only to become someone else when his blood was cold and the wounds had rotten over in bleeding, pus-filled scabs. It’s not Winchester. Winchester was somewhere deep inside, too far hidden away to feel any pain, because Dean Winchester was a coward that perhaps hadn’t been punished well enough, and the Soldier wondered who else inside their insane, fucked-up aching head will find this broken body laying like a condemned man who had survived the gallows, yet also hadn’t lived through the noose.

Whoever they were, they sounded like mom, or at least the facade of what the other’s believed her to sound like. She sang in childish lullabies and poems and foreign fables, but beyond that, the Soldier was in too deep to listen.

* * *

Dean was twenty-one and he wanted to go home.

The bathroom was littered with cigarette ash and broken bottles of tequila, and briefly, Dean thought through the intoxicating haze he found himself drowning in as if anchored to the bottom of the ocean. 

_This makes sense_. 

He pried his sluggish eyes apart, starred up towards the mouldy, cracking ceiling where his mother once lay, and wanted to join her. He could feel the pyretic warmth of burning veins and vermillion blood sizzle within his bone marrow as if it were his destiny, as if dying with his mom was how it should have been from the start. 

Somewhere distantly, Dean heard the screaming voices from the abstract, intangible essence of his crumbling mind, and he wanted to laugh at them. He wanted to die laughing, manically surrendering to where-ever-the-fuck you went after you killed yourself, because he knew the _after_ beyond the end wasn’t rapture. Peace wasn’t made for Dean Winchester and the voices who lived in his head that sometimes sounded like people. He would rot for his sins in the hell he had lived a thousand times over, but that wasn’t terrifying enough to stop his hand from gorging his body through three bottles of burning alcohol until he saw stardust morph into taunting constellations upon the ceiling; it wasn’t enough to force his unfamiliar hand away from the many little perfect pills that he thinks went Sammy or dad are dying. 

“Mom,” Dean gasped, closing his eyes hazily, because there she was, painted in blood and fire upon the sky and he saw angels burn from their wings, disintegrate into stardust. He laughed; what hope did he ever think he had if angels could die?

Smiling, bubbling manic consumed him like flames, as he felt nauseating liquid come up his throat and lips in waves of bile. The ecstasy of a bottle of oxycodone was fading from his veins, fading fast like lovers’ desires to save each other over themselves, and he knew he threw up again, this time on the tiles, staining them red from the colour of his intangible hands and stomach and blood; and something so magnificently white – the colour of purity, of Sammy, of his mother’s nightgowns, of suicide.

Undigested capsules of the pills that should have ceased his existence spilled out across the floor, and it wasn’t fair wasn’t fair wasn’t fair – Dean cried awful sounds and laughed in chaotic hysteria that had him choking on his mania until it broke apart his chest like daggers, like midnight paralytic panic, like dad’s body when it writhed inside him. Who was he to decide shit in this life? Who was he to ask for mercy?

Maybe if he were Sam, if he were pure and good and weren’t so poisoned, tainted or broken – if he were innocent – he’d be able to see his mother again.

_“Call for Sam.”_

And there it was. 

A voice within the screaming mania of what little sanity remained to construct his consciousness broke through the haze of otherworldly voices, and if he willed it hard enough, Dean was able to warp reality, make the soothing, maternal voice in his head seem like his mother lulling him to sleep. 

_“–_ _ere Jacques... Frere Jacques.”_

“–ean you’re dyin–.”

_“Sonnez le_ _–_ _ma_ _–_ _es..._ _–_ _nez les matines...”_

“Do–ez-vous?... rmez-v–?”

_“_ _Call – for your brothe–...–now!”_

The lullaby seared itself against the walls of his mind, amplifying with each shaky breath he breathed like the sound of gunshots ricocheting against the walls, and Dean wanted his mother back. This was such a strange berceuse. He doesn’t think she’d ever sung this one.

His retinas burned white against the darkness, and his pupils blew wide the way they did when a fist smashed itself against his head, or the hardboard collided with his skull. His stomach was convulsing at the nauseating churn, the fest of oxycodone and of tequila thick in his stomach, while his fingers were slick with saliva and vomit where they lay by his mouth, thumb between his lips.

He hated the idea of fighting just this tiny, insignificant, one more time, but _her_ voice in his head was begging for his life, and suddenly Dean was weeping. 

He wanted to see her again. 

He also wanted to be a good little boy who did as his mother said.

“Sam,” He rasped like a prayer, like an incantation to summon angels that didn’t exist, like a ritual to revive the things he’d lost in the fire that suddenly had the power to build his life better as if he were a canvas rebirthing artwork anew. “Sammy.”

He felt immense relief blooming throughout his body as if it were not slowly dying, but the feeling didn’t feel like his own, and for now, Dean was content in floating through the haze of things he couldn’t feel, but did.

There was a warm body next to him. 

They pressed him to their chest, cradling his head and this wasn’t Mary but it felt like _home_ in ways nothing ever could, in ways that should feel unfamiliar, but they didn’t.

His brother didn’t let him go.

“No, no, no! God, Dean! What the fuck did you do?” Sam screamed and he sounded like crimson and death and like what Dean had envisioned as the afterlife for people like him. Sam had moved his ragdoll body so it had collapsed in his lap, and the feeling of overwhelming, undeniable _Sam_ was burning like imploding stars within his insignificant iridescence of a universe. Sam was a bright ember of distorted emotion and overwhelming sensation – a blur of frantic panic that he felt all over in a kaleidoscope of heat and colours and familiarity. Sam touched his hair, his back, his arms, his face –

How was he supposed to explain that sometimes, his head belonged to another, two anothers, perhaps even three, and they were all trapped inside is fraying sanity like glowing fireflies in little glass jars; that sometimes he was a masquerade fragment of his own dead mother, that sometimes he was a marine soldier that liked to hurt himself – purge himself of sin or insubordination – and sometimes he was a fucking kid that wanted building blocks and french lullabies and to eat crayons. 

The reason behind it all evaporated from his mind like burning steam, and suddenly, Dean had no idea of anything.

What _did_ he do? 

_“You were killing yourself,”_ that voice inside his pounding head replied, the one that sounded like a lullaby, and Sam was somewhere in the distance, screaming words that didn’t reach Dean’s level of consciousness.

_I wanted my mom_ , he said back to it.

“Oh, God.” Sam said into a reality that Dean had faded from, but abstractly, intangibly, Dean knew this must be serious. He wanted to tell his brother that this wasn’t suicide, not really, and he shouldn’t be so afriad, but Dean didn’t think Sam would think so. ”... –on’t know, shit! Oxy–... omething, fuck! –ean, open your eyes!”

Sam was talking to someone from beyond Dean’s range of perception, begging the way like someone did who couldn’t anymore and, _yeah_ , that made sense. 

Dean was so fucked up and unbelievably damaged beyond saviour that not even the angels would take him anymore, too broken that his mother wouldn’t recognise the fragmented pieces that Dean Winchester, her son, had collapsed into for her to be able to recognise. Because –… Because he had fallen apart into a million glass shards of unrelenting insanity of voices that controlled the things about himself that he couldn’t, and the dying self-concept to be his brother's protector when everything he touched rotted and died from his tainted, blood-stained hands that were trembled with life he shouldn’t possess. Everything he had been collapsed at the seams, into Sam’s lap with the distant voice of something maternally familiar from above, and Dean wished it hadn’t turned out this way, but it did, it had, and he was sorry.

“Fuck, Dean, c’mon stay with me. They’re coming. It’s – hey, I got you.” Sam breathed in frantic, hypernetalive breaths, because this time he knew he threw up again, yet Sam was there, and maybe his brother thought that was a good thing. Dean wasn’t so sure: the motel bathroom was disgusting, one-way tickets through to the unknown other side were scattered all over the tiles, some undigested and dissolving in the bile, liquor and there’s vomit all over themselves. 

Someone was going to see this. The motel workers were going to have to clean all this up. Or they’re going to have to pay for a few more nights, and John wouldn’t like that: he’ll bruise the walls bloody, paint the colour of Dean’s insides with crimson and smash glass at his skull – but that would be fair, Dean mused. After all, _Sam_ had to see this, and he knew there is no protecting his baby brother after that; there’s no coming back home; there will never ever be anything other than broken pieces on the floor for Dean to cut himself with, rather than rebuild, and maybe, he thought, just _maybe_ , he should have thought this through a little better. 

He hated himself for it all, and his hate was red – the colour of the fire and of his heart and of his brain and of his soul.

* * *

The hospital was white and smelled the way hospitals do with their clinical disinfectant and antibiotics and latex gloves, so Dean knew where he was before he even had to open his eyes. 

And Sam was there, that too.

His eyes were rimmed red the way his blood had looked in the bathroom, his face pale and sad and incredibly tired. He smelled of earthy rosewood and gun powered and old textbooks, and that was so familiar to Dean, it was home; it was Sam – and before Sam even truly realised his brother was awake and conscious and not passing out, choking on dad’s tequila or mouthfuls of undigested opioids, Dean was weeping. 

Sam had ruffled, messy hair that stuck up in the air when he slept on it, and Dean wasn't sure why he ever thought he could leave this world, visit another where the voices were quiet, where perhaps angels were made of marble and celestial stardust reigned above the heavens, and where his mom sang music that sounded like harps of gold into his ringing, earthly ears – because Sam was here, and maybe he was all he ever had in his ungodly, indifferent universe, but it was enough.

“Dean! Oh my god, you’re awake. Are you okay?” Sam rasped when the sniffling and his quiet sobs that hurt his lungs interrupted the Spanish rom-com on the small television. Sam looked at Dean the way those grieving, hysterical families members did whose loved ones had died in supernatural, unexplainable phenomenons that the Winchesters hunted like fanatic lunatics. “Do you want me to go get someone?” 

“No, no. S’okay,” Dean breathed through a throat that scratched against his words with phantom tubing and lungs that seemed pathetically breakable, made of glass and paper. His whole body shook when Sam’s arm came around to wrap his brother around his own arms, strong and steady and warm like he could melt away the aches of the universe with nothing but the knowledge that he would never have to let go again.

“Why the _fuck_ would you do that, Dean?” Sam asked voice thick and Dean thought he may be crying as well. He had his face pressed against Dean’s hair, and he knew his brother was breathing in the smell of burning alcohol, of bloodied bathroom tiles and stale vomit, but couldn’t let Sam go. “I thought I’d lost you.” 

But what was okay, though. Neither could Sam.

“I think I’m losing my mind,” Dean said, and it sounded like a laugh, a manic, crazed, fucked-up bubble of hysterical glee, because why not if he was going insane anyway? “I thought I was possessed, but the holy water, the salt, the crucifix – it didn’t work.” 

He remembered screaming the exorcism at himself in the mirror so hard that his voice had gone silent the next couple days. He remembered punching the mirror and feeling bones explode within his hands. He remembered someone else bleeding his veins dry with an army knife until his body had collapsed like a marionette doll with cut strings, and then he remembered someone else piecing his body back together, stitching up the wounds with dental floss and alcohol and gauze and hello-kitty band-aids. 

“So then maybe it’s just _me_ ,” Dean breathed and Sam’s hand was holding the base of his head, pressing his own forehead to Dean’s as if he’d never thought he would again. “So I tried to fix it –” The words came out of his mouth, and they sounded like steel wool on glass, something awful and raw and made his stomach twist into painful knots like his body was still trying to fight against the corruption he’d ingested to kill it. The waste of tequila and the texture of undigested, powdery oxycodone pills coated his tongue, yet Dean didn’t think he had anything in his stomach to throw up – not with whatever the hospital had done to keep him alive. “It didn’t work.” 

Dean suppressed an aching sob that burned in his chest like wildfire, jotting the broken smithereens of glass from inside, and reassured himself that Sam was here, John was not, and nothing could hurt him in this moment until the next like some sort of ritualistic prayer, like the undying gospel, to an unmerciful god that had no interest in listening to the sad case of Dean Winchester and (sometimes) The Others. “Something is really wrong inside my head. I don’t think I’m me.” 

“I know,” Sam whispered and he was crying too. Dean hoped Sam’s chest hurt didn’t the way his did. 

“Sometimes I’m just _gone_ and I don’t know who I am.” 

“I know, I know,” Sam replied again, like a little prayer of this own, and Dean wasn’t sure how the _fuck_ Sam would know that he wasn’t the only person in his own body, but it made sense that he would. There were things he didn’t know about his own body, that Sam inexplicitly, impossibly did, and _yeah_ , that seemed about right.

“How do we fix this?” Dean whispered, because the problem wasn’t monsters, it wasn’t supernatural fuckheads that could be ganked with kitchen condiments or special water that they spoke words into. There wasn’t a ritual to perform that could mend his mind back together, there wasn’t a cursed object to burn what would make it all go away.

This was complex and mortal, so very fragile, and undeniable _human_. 

“Come with me,” Sam said, bringing his head away from Dean’s and looking into his eyes for the first time. They the same as Dean had always remembered: warm and familiar and a little like sundrops in the rain. They were so terribly sad, unbelievably young, bearably scared – but the indications cast down upon, infected against his soul like healing scars over not-so-paper skin, made them something of _home_. It was a little fucked-up, Dean realised, to think of wounds and pain and pyretic burns from aflamed embers as his only constant in this evil world, calling it his sense of familiarity, but the stars had aligned themselves that way, and it wasn’t Dean’s choice, his destine to rewrite the constellations. Maybe he didn’t want to change them at all. 

From a place in his memories from somewhere distant and abstract, somewhere good amongst all that was ugly, and from somewhere unconditionally _Dean Winchester_ , he and his baby brother Sam used to gaze up to the existing stars and dream up their own constellations.

“C’mon Dean. Fuck this life, fuck our piece of shit asshole for a father. We can start off somewhere else.” Sam told him and he wasn’t begging, not yet, but it sounded pretty close; almost desperate, maybe a bit chaotic, but when was anything not? “We can get you help, we’ll sort things out. We can live a better life than disgusting motels and dad –”

Something in Dean’s eyes must have betrayed him, and Sam had this _look_ like he knew, something so vile and murderous and evil that made Sam not look like _Sam_ anymore, but it was replaced with a facade as soon as it had appeared.

Sam didn’t know, not everything, not yet, not it all – but for the first time in so very, very long, since the beginning that Dean had condemned the _‘end’_ , since his six-year-old tiny body had lied in a bed of broken glass shards, reeking of booze, Dean thinks he might be able to tell him.

“I’m not saying a normal life, Dean,” Sam whispered. “I’m not saying we’ll ever be normal. But we can be _okay_. Because – ” 

Because –

Because Sam and Dean had been broken before. They were mosaics of glass and paper that had shattered like a thousand pieces throughout their young, barely two-decade-old lives. And, yeah, they would break again as if it was somehow foretold, written into their destinies the way the unchangeable stars constellated the sky. Maybe into smaller pieces, maybe it ones that seemed unfixable

But that was okay. They’d rebuild, and put each other back together again with glue and dental floss and hello-kitty bandaids and (most definitely) a lot of therapy. 

And that was okay. It was perfect in its own imperfect way; because they were each other’s homes and just because something broke didn’t make it irredeemable, condemned or otherwise. It made it reconstructable, recoverable; gave them the opportunity to rise into something better from the ashes and smoke of their own lives, and Dean was alright with that. He somehow thinks the others would be, too.

“Yeah, Sammy.” He breathed. “Let’s get outta here.”


End file.
